color map node

[TheAdmira1]

So Ive been working on a full model of a Macaw in my digital materials class... first assignment was to create the procedural texture of the Beak, this past week I have been making the feathers in file based, next i will be making the face and eye using sub-surface, and finally i will be putting it all together for a 10 second piece...

when i was putting together my texture for the feathers, however, i realized that color mapping wasn't exactly loved by Houdini... (i could be completely wrong on this)

i was trying to make grids act as my feathers, using an opacity and alpha to "cut-out" the shape i wanted, that way i could just use the grids and easily change the shape of the feather without having to remodel.... the problem was using a map for opacity and alpha... i couldn't figure out how to do it easily, so i wrote a vop node using cutter... this code is extremely simple, no bells and whistles, only an image map as a string and brightness as a float in, and vector color out...

/* vop */
surface
mapToColor(string mapname = "";
			float	brightness = 1)

{
vector mapcolor = 0;
if(mapname != "")
	mapcolor = colormap(mapname, s, t);
Cf = Of * mapcolor * brightness;
}

like i said nothing special, but it works very easily... i put my opacity map in one, my surface color in another, and finally my alpha in the last, plugged them into a lambert and everything worked great...